Weeks after a chemical plant inferno, nearby residents say they’re suffering prolonged illnesses and financial upheaval

Conyers, Georgia (CNN) — The opaque plumes of noxious smoke billowing out of a Georgia chemical plant are long gone. But the relentless effects of the BioLab fire in Conyers are still visible, residents say – from exacerbated rashes to mounting bills to nagging symptoms and piles of prescriptions.

“My vision still ain’t like it should be,” said Kisha Reid, a nurse who said she’s visited at least three doctors since the blaze propelled chlorine smoke for miles. “I don’t know if the chemicals had burnt it so bad.”

CNN spoke with several Conyers residents over the past week who said they still have blurry vision, shortness of breath, throat irritation or chronic headaches since the September 29 chemical plant fire. But they say their doctors haven’t been able to prove whether their ailments are directly linked to the BioLab inferno.

Reid’s husband, Akeno, said he still suffers shortness of breath and chronic headaches that won’t go away with medication.

When a headache comes on, “you can’t function because it’s just too intense,” he said.

The personal trainer said he also had to “drain savings” and run up his credit cards due to the BioLab catastrophe. “I have dozens of clients that I train. Obviously, they didn’t want to actually come outside.”

His two other businesses – running a transport company and managing a local Airbnb – came to a halt when a chemical haze filled the air for days. Airbnb reservations got canceled. Two of his personal training clients left him permanently.

The BioLab disaster has cost the Reids at least $20,000 in lost income, hotel stays during their evacuation, medical bills and cleaning equipment to get smoky residue off their home, Mr. Reid said.

A BioLab spokesperson said the company has supported residents by helping with claims, reimbursement requests and debris removal from private properties. It has also fielded “tens of thousands of calls to our 24/7 call center,” opened an in-person assistance center and appointed a liaison to listen to the community’s needs.

But the Reids and other residents say no amount of money or support can compensate for all the harm caused – and the constant trepidation of possible long-term consequences.

“That’s our biggest fear,” Mr. Reid said.

A veteran of BioLab fires says she has symptoms again

This is the second major fire at BioLab to upend Brandy Conner’s life.

Twenty years ago, Conner had to evacuate from her workplace after a noxious plume from BioLab filled the sky. She went home – only to discover her house was in the path of the billowing smoke.

“I went from going right beside the toxic fire to the direct path of the toxic cloud that was being emitted into our county,” she recalled. “Everybody in the county was affected.”

The 2004 fire “prompted mass evacuations due to the release of over 12.5 million pounds of chemicals,” Rockdale County officials said in a recent lawsuit after BioLab’s latest fire.

Conner recalled that 2004 smoke plume was visible for one to two days and said she suffered nausea for about a week.

But she believes this year’s disaster was a far greater catastrophe.

The pre-dawn fire started September 29 at a BioLab warehouse storing raw materials.

BioLab produces pool and spa water sanitization products. The warehouse that caught fire contained trichloroisocyanuric acid (TCCA) – a chemical used to make chlorinated tablets to control bacteria and algae – and dichloroisocyanuric acid (DCCA), which is used to make swimming pool shock – a treatment used to help break down contaminants.

It’s not clear what sparked the initial fire, which remains under investigation by the US Chemical Safety Board. But the blaze turned into a raging inferno after it “activated a sprinkler system that malfunctioned and doused water-reactive trichloroisocyanuric acid (“TCCA”) inside the building,” Rockdale County said in its lawsuit.

When TCCA touches a small amount of water and doesn’t dissolve, “it can experience a chemical reaction, generating heat and causing the decomposition of the chemical, which in turn produces toxic chlorine gas and can produce explosive nitrogen trichloride,” a 2023 report by the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board said.

The federal report came after a 2020 incident at another BioLab facility in Westlake, Louisiana. “After the buildings at the Bio-Lab facility were damaged by Hurricane Laura winds, rainwater contacted the TCCA stored inside, initiating a chemical reaction and subsequent decomposition of the TCCA,” the report said.

“The heat produced from the reaction and decomposition initiated a fire, and the decomposition released a large plume of hazardous gases [sic], including toxic chlorine, into the air.”

Four years after that, Conner found herself caught in the haze of another BioLab fire in Conyers.

“I work from home, which is again … in the direct path of that toxic cloud,” she said.

Even after the blaze was snuffed out, a chemical haze shrouded neighborhoods more than a dozen miles away.

For days,shifting winds swept the chemical haze back and forth in multiple cities, including parts of Atlanta – about 30 miles away. Rockdale County issued a shelter-in-place advisory for 90,000 residents, and about 17,000 residents had to evacuate.

The health effects of chlorine exposure “depend on the duration of exposure and exposure concentration,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an email to CNN.

“Exposure to low levels of chlorine can result in nose, throat, and eye irritation. At higher levels, breathing chlorine gas may result in changes in breathing rate and coughing, and damage to the lungs,” the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said.

The Environmental Protection Agency set up air quality monitors the day of the fire and tested the air for almost three weeks, EPA On-Scene Coordinator Bryan Vasser said.

“We had between eight and 10 fixed location air monitors that were set up from between about a quarter mile of the site out to about a mile of the site,” focusing on residential areas, Vasser said.

“Once there had been three or four days of essentially only low-level detections” – and after officials believed the plant would no longer emit uncontrolled releases into the air – “then the county made the decision to lift the shelter-in-place and the evacuations, based on the data that the EPA provided,” Vasser said.

But the air quality monitors were set up outdoors – not inside any homes.

The “EPA did not do any indoor air monitoring. The advisement of the health officials was that chlorine is typically non-persistent,” meaning it tends to dissipate easily, Vasser said.

“If people are concerned about it, they’re advised … to open doors and windows” now that the outdoor air has normalized, he said. “Running your air conditioner is (also) an effective way to have air exchanges inside of your house.”

But Conner wonders if toxic chemicals may have collected in her home when she followed the county’s shelter-in-place advisory, closed all the windows and turned off the air conditioning. “We all know that our houses aren’t airlocked. Air gets in. So that’s a big source of anxiety,” she said.

Conner believes intense chlorine exposure triggered her now-daily headaches – which can be “pounding” and resistant to medication, she said.

“To this day, I wake up with a headache, and I go to bed with a headache,” she said last week. “I have had a recent MRI and an eye exam. And there is nothing going on that the doctors are attributing to the daily headaches.”

It may be difficult to prove whether the chlorine exposure might have caused long-term damage to Conner’s body and resulted in chronic headaches even after the smoke has disappeared.

“There are no medical tests to determine whether you have been exposed specifically to chlorine,” the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said.

“Chlorine is transformed in the body into chloride ions, which are normal components of the body. An enormous amount of chlorine has to be inhaled or ingested in order to detect a significant increase in chloride ions in the blood.”

Many symptoms and no answers

Kisha Reid laid out about a half dozen prescription bottles, creams and an inhaler for various symptoms since the fire.

“These are things for my skin – it flared up my psoriasis,” she said while holding two handfuls of medications.

“These are the things I went to the eye doctor to get. My eyes wouldn’t stop burning. I got this (inhaler) from the urgent care for the breathing, the shortness of breath. … Hydroxyzine, for the itching and burning. They gave me that, too, because it affected my skin so bad.”

She said the burning sensation in her eyes was unbearable and ended after three weeks. But her vision is still blurry.

“I don’t know what was in the chemicals, but it affected my vision and my eyes so bad,” she said.

Ms. Reid has preexisting psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that can cause itchy, scaly rashes. She and her husband said her psoriasis was almost completely controlled until the BioLab smoke drifted toward their house.

What used to be a minor rash over some parts of her body before the fire turned into a head-to-toe rash after the BioLab explosion, she said.

“My skin was just peeling” – far more severely than before, Ms. Reid said. She said she conceals the rash on her face with makeup.

A dermatologist recommended she stand in front of a full body-length UVB lamp to help minimize the rashes. But Ms. Reid worries about whether such exposure to UV rays will cause long-term damage to her skin.

Her husband said he’s also visited a doctor to get relief for his symptoms, but to no avail.

“I’m still having the headaches,” Mr. Reid said last week. “Shortness of breath and headaches (are) long-term effects. Right now, they’re telling me that they want to monitor the situation and see how it progresses.”

BioLab did not directly address the residents’ complaints of lasting ailments, other than to advise anyone with ongoing symptoms to consult a healthcare professional.

Mr. Reid said he knows BioLab is offering reimbursement for residents directly impacted by the fire. “But at this point, I don’t know how you repay stress and anxiety.”

Despite living in one of Conyers’ more affluent neighborhoods, the Reids say they’re considering moving.

“I don’t want to live next to a chemical plant,” Mr. Reid said. “That’s not the type of chance that I want to take.”

Weeks of missed income and school

Some of the disaster’s impacts are less tangible and affected some of the youngest residents.

About 15,000 students from Rockdale County Public Schools couldn’t go to school for three weeks and had to learn remotely.

“In the interest of prioritizing the safety and well-being of our students and staff, it was prudent to activate our independent and virtual learning protocol while we continuously monitored the environmental impact of the BioLab incident,” Superintendent Terry Oatts said in a statement last month.

The announcement came the same day Rockdale County lifted its nightly shelter-in-place advisory, which lasted for weeks.

Students returned to school October 21. But by then, parents like Ms. Reid’s daughter had already lost weeks of income because she had to stay home while her child was out of school.

“She had to miss time from work … unpaid,” Ms. Reid said. “She didn’t have a choice.”

The grandmother also worries about how much in-person learning her granddaughter missed. “She can’t get that time back in school,” Ms. Reid said.

County tries to oust BioLab from Conyers

Almost one month after the disaster, Rockdale County sued BioLab and its parent company, KIK Consumer Products, seeking a court order to shut down the plant “to prevent any further emissions of harmful chemicals into the environment.”

The complaint, filed October 28, says BioLab and KIK failed “to properly secure and manage hazardous materials stored on-site, and to properly install and maintain fire suppression systems adequate to quickly and effectively extinguish fires that are volatile and reactive.”

Rockdale County is also seeking damages such as “expenses associated with emergency response efforts, evacuation procedures, and public health measures necessitated by the explosion at the Bio-Lab plant,” the lawsuit states.

“The damages also encompass economic losses due to business interruptions, decreased property values, and the long-term impact on community health and safety, which collectively represent a substantial financial burden on the city. These damages are directly caused by Defendants’ pollution.”

When asked whether BioLab plans to shut down its facility in Conyers, the company’s spokesperson declined to comment. But he said employees are back at work.

“BioLab’s Distribution Center at Conyers was cleared by relevant authorities and regulators to reopen on November 4 and resume fulfilling customer orders for finished products,” the company said in a written statement Saturday.

“We are grateful that our Conyers team members have returned to work at the Distribution Center and appreciate their continued support and dedication. At this time, the Conyers plant has not resumed manufacturing operations, and any resumption of operations will only be undertaken with approval from authorities and regulators.”

‘The most asinine part of this whole situation’

Just like the county officials, Conner and the Reids also want BioLab out of Rockdale County.

“Accidents are going to happen. But an accident like this, in my opinion, was 100% preventable in the fact that you have a water fire sprinkler system over chemicals that react badly to water,” Conner said.

“That’s the most asinine part of this whole situation … You didn’t put foam over something that acts badly in the water?”

BioLab’s spokesperson did not directly answer repeated questions about why the company had a water sprinkler system over water-reactive materials. But he said finding the root cause of the fire is critical.

“We recognize the importance of determining what caused this incident, and are conducting a thorough review, collaborating closely with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB), as it performs its review, as well as with other state and federal health and safety agencies,” the spokesperson said in an email to CNN.

‘The damage is already done’

One month after the disaster, Christine Smith said the only way she can feel relief from her throat irritation is to escape Rockdale County.

Several members of her family – including her dog – felt symptoms shortly after the chemical fire erupted near her home, Smith said.

“My eyes were itching and watering. My throat was irritated … it’s scary,” she said.

She’s haunted by the memory of looking out her front door and seeing “something out of a movie” – thick clouds of black and red smoke.

“It was just the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” Smith said. “The smoke turned from black to red to gray.”

She rounded up several family members and drove to Texas to stay with relatives for a few days. But before doing so, she let her dog Cairo outside in the backyard one more time.

On the drive to Texas, “My dog started throwing up and defecating on himself,” Smith said. “I (had) let my dog outside in the backyard … and I let him use the bathroom. And of course, he’s sniffing all on the ground. So I wasn’t even really thinking until after it happened.”

When she returned four days after the fire, “The smell of bleach was still so heavy,” Smith said.

“When I got back, my symptoms returned. My throat was still kind of itchy the whole time we were gone, but it seemed like it got worse when I got back here.”

Smith said the stench of chlorine stayed “heavy for two weeks.” She believes the chlorine also damaged her car, leaving white specks on the exterior and eroding parts of the paint before she drove to Texas.

Weeks later, Smith said she still can’t shake the throat irritation. Now, the BioLab fire has forced her to consider selling the beloved house that she helped design in 2006.

“If the opportunity to leave arises – and I feel that is the choice for our family – because of this incident, by all means, we would move in a heartbeat,” she said.

But “right now, because of my situation and finances, I have no choice but to stay in Conyers.”

If Rockdale County succeeds in getting the BioLab plant shut down, the outcome still might not be enough to make Smith want to stay.

“Even if they take away BioLab, it doesn’t take away what happened,” she said. “The damage is already done.”

Like other residents, Smith worries about her property value plummeting and possible long-term hazards to her family.

“Right now, I feel safe,” she said. “But am I safe? I don’t know.”